6 Ways to Get Bad-Quality Icons

In this post, we’ll be talking about the most common mistakes that are usually made when designing or choosing icons for your social profiles and accounts, or websites, etc.

This is one more interesting article that I found on the Internet and decided to sum up and share it with you.

Icons with the size 16 x 16 are very popular and still play a significant role in the Internet life. That’s why the drawbacks that we’re going to discuss today mostly consider this icons size (and maybe 32 x 32).

1. Make it hard to distinguish

There are cases when one needs a set of icons that look almost similar. It’s quite all right if the icons are big enough. And if the resolution is small? It’s really hard to distinguish the icons, not saying about letters and phrases.

2. Use too many details

It’s highly recommended to use as less elements in one icon as possible. The smaller the icon the less elements should be used! Always keep in mind that your icons might some time be used in the smallest resolution admissible.

3. Inconsistence rules

When you look for the icons for your website, webpage or social profile, consider their stylistic unity. It might be color, shadows, graphical techniques, perspective, etc. If you don’t bother to sort out stylistically compatible icons, the images set will look like a bright, colorful but very unusual and sometimes irritating potpourri.

4. Overload with shadows and volume

3D techniques have become very popular. Add shadows to it and you get a blurred stain instead of an icon of 16 x 16.

5. Choose unreasonably unique icons

Each design always means a reasonable balance of clearness, recognition and unique form. Before you think over some new shapes for an ordinary thing, just surf on the Internet to look at other designers’ solutions on the same topic.

6. Add text in the icon

It’s the most common thought – to create an icon basing on the existing logo. But think about a couple of the following things:

A logo uses a definite language which might vary depending on the country where it’s used. And it becomes very difficult to adjust a small icon to another reality.

If an icon is small it’s really hard to understand what is written in it.